The LEGO Storage Guide
This in-depth guide helps you understand your LEGO collection, find the best way to organize your LEGO bricks, and discover the best LEGO storage for your home and budget. It also includes recommendations for displaying and storing your LEGO minifigures.
Introduction
Table of Contents
- Section I: Organizing, Sorting, & Storing LEGO Bricks
- Chapter 1: Understanding your LEGO Collection
- Chapter 2: Organizing your LEGO Bricks
- Chapter 3: LEGO Storage for Small Collections
- Chapter 4: LEGO Storage for Medium Collections
- Chapter 5: LEGO Storage for Large Collections
- Chapter 6: Additional LEGO Brick Storage Tips & Tricks
- Section II: Displaying & Storing LEGO Minifigures
- Appendix: Glossary & Bibliography
- Appendix: Version History & Acknowledgements
While this guide has already helped more than 100,000 LEGO enthusiasts organize their LEGO collection, your feedback makes it even better… If you have questions or suggestions, leave a comment below or email me at tom@tomalphin.com. Thanks!
Hi Tom! I love your site I used your labels as a base to make ones that suited my specific collection. I added color bars for common parts and rainbow color bars for less common and smaller elements! This helped a lot between your color chart and label images. I just wanted to request or mention two elements the 1x2x3 brick and the the 1x2x5 wall element with groove. I would love to send you photos of the drawer and bin system I’m using with your labels! I very much appreciate your dedication to making the afol community a more organized place!
This post is amazing and I get knowleged in this.Thank you very much!
Thank you for pulling all of this information together, and sharing it! I learned so much about the best ways for me to sort, and made a change to what I was doing that’s already proven to be successful! I’d previously sorted by color and then separated out some elements and had a TON of ziplocks that were hard to use with my collection. I switched to sorting into six main categories (bricks, 1x_ bricks as I use them a lot in our mini-scenes for our instagram account, plates, 1x_plates, slopes, SNOT, and Other, with a smaller number of ziplocks to separate the Other (plant pieces, minifig accessories, 1x1s, round tiles, square or rectangle tiles, printed/stickered pieces, etc.). I just built my first MOC after re-sorting and found it SO much easier and faster to build, and easier to tidy up afterward! I have a medium-sized collection, and am using two 3-drawer XL Sterilite containers, and am considering transferring the ziplock contents soon into a Sterilite snap-close container with multiple divided sections that come out of the container. I also appreciated reading all of the helpful comments from others!
My LEGOs are pretty well orgnized, but I came across a small problem: I sometimes don’t know, what to build. When my bricks were all in a big box, I could just grab a hand. That’s the idea behind https://brickshuffle.com . Maybe it’s useful to someone else here, too.
Hy Tom
Sorry for the late reply. I actually ordered on Amazon.de (Germany) and I got the Iris boxes… I think you mentioned them somewhere. They are absolutely awesome and have an amazing price. Here is the Link: https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B00KRAWM5Y/ref=ya_aw_od_pi?ie=UTF8&psc=1 / Iris Drawer Box with 12 Drawers… really great, especially for €50.-
Can you take the drawers out?
Thanks for sharing. This gives me some great ideas, I just inherited a huge lot of Lego bricks and am always looking for different organizational and storage ideas.
I would be interested to learn how you decide which elements to make labels for and which to exclude. I am attempting to come to grips with a pretty large lego collection, and I am finding some gaps, even given the extensive number of labels you already have produced. (The “technic” batch had more of my elements than I initially realized, so that closed my perceived ‘label gap’ considerably.)
I am traveling for work at the moment, but I wonder: If I came up with a list of elements still missing labels if they might be considered for Label Batch 3.1?
Andrew,
There are a few factors that impact the likelihood of creating a label:
1) Is the part common? How many sets contain it? Do you usually just get one in a set, or do you get a bunch?
2) Is it a general-purpose part? Can it be used in a variety of themes, and in alternate ways?
3) Does it come in a range of colors? If it only comes on one color, it needs to be pretty common. (ex many Technic elements).
3) Is it retired? I’m extremely unlikely to make labels for parts which have been retired.
4) Lastly, do I personally have a number of that part? (It’s not the primary motivation for adding new parts to the collection, but there are definitely some less common parts already in the collection because I happen to have a few of them.)
I’m currently focused on brand new parts that are likely to become common soon, and parts which are still in production and come in at least 40 sets. You can always ask, and i’ll see what I can do.
—tom
Great Guide! Over the past few months, I have been regularly looking for inspiration on how to store my LEGO supply in the best way possible. I never came across experience reports that satisfied my high standards. That really has changed with your guide.
For a dust- and scratch-free storage of my minifigures, I now use and highly recommend the “Feldherr Storage Box for 144 miniatures” with rectangular compartments (https://www.feldherr.net/feldherr-storage-box-for-144-miniatures/a-53529/).
My first box was for 180 miniatures (https://www.feldherr.net/feldherr-storage-box-for-180-miniatures/a-53530/). But the asymmetrical compartments of the foam trays are partly too short, so I have to fold in the legs of the figures. That’s not bad, but I’d like it different. And they are partly too small for minifigures with headdress or accessories. Only the first and last row of trays are slightly larger so that an “outstretched” minifig will fit in.
This solution may be a little over the top, but I think it’s good.
Dennis,
That seems a little bit over-the-top for LEGO minifigures, but I’m glad to hear that it’s working well for you.
The 144 miniatures box is available in the USA as well, currently for 39.99$ http://amzn.to/2i2XYz2 (Not a bad price for something that can store so many minifigs!)
Great article, this is a detailed video on the Papimax storage boxes mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvvs4hk6U78
Logan, I haven’t tried your product yet since it’s not readily available in the US, but it looks pretty good from what I can see. Thanks for sharing the video.
—tom
Great compiled information. Already posted your link to our LUG site (Gricks) for new and old members to read. In the future you can always add a section with the timeless question of what happens with the stored bricks/minifig parts, if left connected for a (very) long period, but i guess that’s a borderline psychotic one 😛
Thanks for sharing it with your LUG!
I’m actually very interested in the question of Brick Fatigue – see this forum discussion I just started: http://bricksetforum.com/discussion/27453/brick-fatigue-or-cracking-when-model-remains-assembled-too-long#latest
Is this available as a pdf?
It is not offered as a PDF at this time, but you can print any chapter and it should look great! (I created custom CSS to make the guide look great on a Phone, Tablet, PC, or when printed in Portrait mode on Letter, Legal or A4 sizes.)
Most of the web links will show the destination URL when printed, and some optional text like the comments, page headers, footers, and mini table-of-contents for each chapter are hidden for print. Let me know if you see any issues while printing the guide!
—tom
Thanks
Hy there
This guide is amazing. 🙂 I had to organize my Lego without your great help
and so I came up with my own ideas (for Switzerland or Germany, when it
comes to ordering stuff). I tried to also use links from Amazon.com but yeah…
Maybe you have use for it even if my part is not as sophisticated as yours… 😉
Sacha,
Glad to hear you are enjoying the guide! I’d love to learn – Which products did you order from Germany / Switzerland? Did you like them?
Sincerely,
—tom
Mr. Alpin,
Awesome work so far. I presume this will be published eventually with photos as a physical book. Have you considered a section on storage of the various manuals and instructions, stickers and periphery elements that LEGO produces for some of their sets. I know for myself the various sizes of the instructions make it difficult to store and sort all together, any insight from other AFOL’s would be good to see. Looking forward to purchasing your book once published. Kind Regards Scott
Scott, thanks for the kind words and feedback. I do not have plans to make a printed book at this time, but we’ll see what happens.
I do plan to add sections for storing Manuals, Instructions, stickers and other LEGO accessories in the future. We’ll see how far it goes, due to the law of diminishing returns.
Sincerely,
—tom
I once used ring folders with plastic pockets for each two or more manuals. (Some bigger sets require more than one pocket alone – sets with three big manuals for instance) I would never dream of punching holes in manuals – holes would surely tend to hit critical information like the number of parts needed for building or something like that. Also it would decrease the value greatly of your manuals. I had tried to obtain folders in a myriad of colours, so I always knew that Ninjago took up most of the dark red folder or Adventurers was in the back of the tan folder. Originally I had planned that they should stand upright next to each other forming some sort of rainbow paying tribute to all the colours of the bricks.
But alas, I parted with that system, as manuals weigh too much to be stored that way – I ended up having to stack the folders, which had to lie down in order to avoid distortion from the weight of the many manuals that can fit in one folder.
I had for some time worked in a small office, where we had a very primitive way of handling lots of paperwork – most went into ring folders or elastic folders – a small portion went into some Ikea shelf with a bottomless drawer, that allowed for a few dozen hanging file folders to be hung side by side. At some point it dawned on me that a file cabinet was the right solution for me. I’ve seen file cabinets in so many crime movies over the years – I actually felt a bit stupid not realizing, that file cabinets don’t solely belong to offices, but could also solve my problem. I guess I had gotten too attached to those ring folders and just desperately hoped I would someday make it work properly. I then researched the market and found that office apparel is always kind of pricy. I decided to search the used market, and was I surprised – there were plenty of file cabinets for sale everywhere at half or less price. I decided to go for quality, so I went with a very sturdy black metal file cabinet from Bisley. It took some careful tumbling to get it all the way down in cellar. It came with about 50 portfolio-sized hanging file folders in a handful of different colours. From the tags I could tell that the cabinet once held documents from a doctor’s office.
To my luck shortly after that I was part of arranging a Christmas fair for our local scouts. When almost closing up and getting ready to clean up after the two-day event, I stumbled upon this unsteady shelf, which I opened out of curiosity – realizing that it was a drawer for hanging file folders. It immediately spawned my curiosity to search further near and around the shelf, and to my luck I found a big worn down moving box almost full of hanging file folders. And not just any kind – something close to the best and most expensive folders – I knew that from research at that point. In that box were more than 200 A4-sized, dark green and close to mint Twinlock Diamond hanging file folders with a small box full of unused folder tags – and I got all of it for practically nothing – I actually paid twice the price they asked for to be a bit fair, but still it was close to a steal. Now I had about 50 uniform folders per drawer – all I had to do was to change the cabinet format from portfolio to A4.
Now I could empty my twenty-something ring folders one by one and put all the manuals in one cabinet. I used an Excel sheet at first to plan my folder contents and have it now as a reference to the cabinet, so that I can reach for any manual in seconds when I need it. Also I found out that I could put really huge instructions (death star and such) inside one of the drawers below the hanging file folders, thus every single instruction or manual goes in that cabinet – I really like simplicity like that. Oh, and the cabinet comes with a lock and keys – a nice feature too.
Today half a decade later I’m in need of my second file cabinet, but that’s just expansion and not really a problem. I have lots of unbuilt and unopened sets so I estimate that I could easily fill up more than half of the second file cabinet already.
Hope my story or solution helps you or anyone out there.
This is a great explanation of the evolution of your own LEGO Manual storage, and I will be referencing your suggestions when I start write the section on LEGO Manuals. thanks!
You’re most welcome 🙂
Can’t wait to dive into this. I am an organizing fiend. Already used all the labels you have available. Need More!
I have been following you for almost 3 years. Love the labels. Thanks for adding more.
Donny, thanks for the kind words about the LEGO Brick Labels collection. I hope the LEGO Storage Guide is a valuable tool for you as your collection grows and evolves.
Sincerely,
—tom
Would you like some proof reading? I am happy to share comma placement, word choice etc.
Otherwise I LOVE it!
Yes, please!
Suggestions to make the text easier to understand or to correct grammatical mistakes are always welcome. You can send edits via email, or by leaving comments on the appropriate page.
Love this Guide! Great as your book! Greetings from Italy!
Awesome article. Helped me out a lot.
Great work and very useful, thanks!
Awesome help. Thanks.